The beatification of Ronald Wilson Reagan by American conservatives is itself a grisly affair but at least he was their President. The tendency of some on the British right to elevate Reagan to saintly status is just embarrassing. This does not mean he was not a fine President – in many ways he was – merely that all these years later it still seems impossible to achieve a balanced appreciation of Reagan’s record in office. For many years, at home and abroad, he was under-rated, patronised by a complacent oppposition bamboozled by Reagan’s style into thinking there was no “there” there; now the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction and we’re asked by some to believe that Reagan was the greatest President in the history of the United States of America. This won’t do either.
Perhaps the most mysterious of all recent Presidents, Reagan’s legacy is more complicated than the duelling cartoons of Cowboy or Rushmore-status suggest. Yes, he cut taxes but he also raised them when it was judged necessary. Yes he promoted the “reagan Doctrine” of roll-back and sponsored guerilla groups around the world; he also gave tacit encouragement to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Yes he possessed a rare degree of empathy but his handling of the AIDS epidemic was tardy to the point it became disastrous.
Nor, despite the promise of the supply-side revolution, did Reagan succeed in shrinking the size of governement. Then again, his determination to do so was often hedged. Yes he said “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” but this was subject to the qualification “in this present crisis”. As far back as 1975 the Gipper suggested libertarianism was “the very heart and soul of conservatism” but this was a matter of instinct or sympathy, not a platform for goverment.
Nor should this surprise. Thirty years on it is Reagan’s pragmatism, camouflaged by that familiar sunny-but-mildly-baffled style, that stands out as his most vital attribute. Even Iran-Contra, illegal and disgraceful as it may have been, served a practical aim: getting the hostages home. Here too, however, Reagan showed himself more flexible than many of his successors.
This is something Mehdi Hasan gets at in his Guardian piece today. If Reagan wasn’t quite the “dove” Mehdi suggests, his foreign policy was certainly more nuanced than that of so many of his Republican successors. Indeed he quickly disappointed hawks. Norman Podhoretz published a famous essay in the New York Times titled “The Neoconservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy” while in Commentary, Podhoretz’s magazine, Robert Tucker denounced Reagan’s approach to the Middle East as “Carterism without Carter”.
If presiding over the beginning of the end of the Cold War was Reagan’s greatest accomplishment this too was a more compelx achievement than is sometimes recalled. Many of his advisors – including the likes of Dick Cheney – thought Reagan’s opening to Gorbachev hopelessly naive. The President should not, they warned, by fooled by ruses called glasnost and perestroika. But here too Reagan’s essential optimism proved vital. Without that quality it’s not so clear his summit meetings with Gorbachev could have proved so successful. Trust and verify would be the Reagan approach, not verify then trust. In many respects this was a gamble too, albeit one that paid off.
Of course Reagan wasn’t the only man to win the Cold War. Its generally happy aftermath owes much to Walesa and Havel and many others (including, incidentally, the European Union) but it still owed much to Reagan’s faith in humanity and the possibility of progress. In that respect he was not much of a Tory either and still possessed trace elements of his liberal past. Then again, the Reagan timber was aye crooked.
Still, the appeal is obvious. The sweeping vision mattered more than the messy details and the details could be sacrificed to serve the vision too. Moreover, when in doubt print the legend even if it would be both wiser and more helpful to remember that Reagan’s presidency was more nuanced and complicated than his subsequent canonisation would have you believe. Forgetting that does neither Reagan nor today’s generation of conservatives any favours. And yet this is where we are. “What would Reagan do?” is not always the most helpful question and becomes even less useful when you get the answers wrong too.
UPDATE: Heresy Corner has more on Reagan and his legacy.
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